We are excited to announce our streamlined user integration with Autodesk’s Netfabb® Software. In addition to the Netfabb functions that you already know, the new integration offers several key features to help your design process.

Features of Form 2 within Netfabb:

New Workspaces: Users can load a Form 2 in the machine workspace and connect directly to PreForm

Custom Supports: Create and modify your own support strategy to optimize parts for the Form 2

Regarding custom supports… did you guys actually take Preform support generation code and up/downstream it into Netfabb? Or does it use their own lattice generation algorithm?

Are the features you described available in the free version of Netfabb? Do I need to whole 7+ GB’s of Premium?!

I haven’t used Netfabb much yet, if anyone has played around with these new features I’d love to hear about it. Especially if there’s a way to maintain your tailored support structure between minor revisions of your model.

Any chance on having a webinar on how to leverage netfab’s capabilities when using our Form2 ?

We bough your machine because with PreForm it is a self-contained system. We haven’t looked at other slicers and would do so with netfab is there was an advantage on doing so, but from what I have gathered about this software I have trouble seeing how exactly it offers more than preform.

There are a lot of things you can do with Netfabb. Here is a short list of things:

Repair your model automatically or selectively.
You can modify the model on a per polygon basis
Separate composite models into discrete parts
Cut the model using either the x, y or Z planes or combination thereof.
Mirror/reflect the model on any plane,
import and export in a dozen or so different formats,
and of course generate slice if you want to go directly to a 3D printer.

These are all the things the basic (FREE) version can do. The pay for version also does a lot of additional thing, the most important of which is the ability to Boolean multiple solids.

Repair your model automatically or selectively.
You can modify the model on a per polygon basis
Separate composite models into discrete parts
Cut the model using either the x, y or Z planes or combination thereof.
Mirror/reflect the model on any plane,
import and export in a dozen or so different formats,
and of course generate slice if you want to go directly to a 3D printer.

Thanks for this, it confirms my impression that the free versions offers what I basically already do in Solidworks before exporting to STL.

Do you know if there are any features regarding support generation that would make it a better choice than Preform in certain situations ? I think that’s really the only part of the feature set of the software that I would be interested in.

Thanks, everyone, for all of the feedback! I’d like to clarify a couple of your questions:

@rkagerer: Netfabb uses its own algorithm to generate lattice structures and supports, which are then imported into Preform.

The features are currently available in the 2018.3 (March Release) of Standard, Premium, and Ultimate versions of Netfabb. It’s not available in the Free (unlicensed) version, but our team knows that people are interested in this.

The new features integrated into Preform (like mesh repair) are available in the latest Preform update.

@JohnHue: great suggestion about the webinar! We’ll see if there is enough interest to put something together.

Hey Duann here from Autodesk.
Specific to Formlabs machines you can do custom supports and automatically shell, lattice and add drainage holes to a part to reduce materials used, and time to print.
There are a bunch of other features like ‘mesh to BREP’, advanced mesh repair, CAD import, boolean and tagging operations that can come in handy.

If you use Solidworks exclusively to create your models then export them to STL for printing purposes, then NetFabb doesn’t offer anything substantial.

BUT if you are working with files that you got somewhere else, that are not native to Solidworks or that can’t be imported into Solidworks for editing, then NetFabb is your friend.

I’m a Solidworks user, but I also download files that are in a variety of other formats, so I found that SW is not the end all be all. I use a core of other apps, including Netfabb, MeshMixer & MeshLab, just to be able to get some of those files in a printable state.

Thanks for clarifying Duann, in what version of netfabb are these features included? Custom supports in general seems to be only a premium version. Is the one specific for formlabs available in the standard version?

Hi Isaac,
We put some of the functionality from Premium in the Formlabs workspace in Standard as a special treat for Form2 users because we are big fans of the machine.
We also have a discount code for 25% off Standard and Premium in the Autodesk store if you use FORMLABS25 as a promo code in the checkout valid till the end of the year.

Thanks for the reply @Duann . I bought Netfabb Private a long time ago. Apart from the workspace addition, can you clarify if there are any improvements as far as performance when splitting, hollowing, repairing models?
From cursory use of the trial I found it was more or less the same (that is to say very slow and single threaded) from my version of like 4 years ago.